


The Stuff of Dreams

by the_moonmoth



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-02
Updated: 2016-03-02
Packaged: 2018-05-24 06:39:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6144853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_moonmoth/pseuds/the_moonmoth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Greatest fears and the back porch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Stuff of Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt “Giles and Spike; someone’s greatest fear.” Beta’d by Bewildered, who, as ever, is awesome <3

 

After Buffy had died, there had been a night – through the alcohol and grief haze, he doesn’t remember when exactly, but it couldn’t have been more than a week later – when he’d found himself in the watcher’s lounge, breaking into his single malt stash with the express intent of getting caught, simply out of loathing for his own wretched company. He didn’t get thrown out – somehow he’d known that he wouldn’t be – and instead they’d sat together for the remainder of that night, drinking together in mostly-silence, until Spike passed out on the couch.

 

He figures it must’ve been that night that the knowledge comes from, because he’s usually got a pretty decent memory – especially for information about Buffy – but the conversation as he remembers it is only in bits and fragments. He can’t remember saying anything himself, only listening to Rupert’s whiskey-ravaged voice. The children wanted to bury Buffy, he’d said – put her in the ground in some quiet corner of the woods on the edge of the graveyard, with a stone at her head and worms at her toes, boxed away and labelled all neat like. Old Rupert had told them – don’t put her in the ground. Her worst fear was being buried alive, they’d all seen it during some spell of years gone by, and it just didn’t feel right. He’d wanted her cremated, set free and scattered on the wind, and Spike had liked that idea at the time, though the thought of it now makes him shudder. The children didn’t listen, of course, and buried her anyway. Spike has always wondered if the little red witch had been planning something even then. But at any rate, in those terrible days before she’d come back, it’d been a strange comfort to know that there were still things to find out about her. Like she wasn’t entirely gone; not in the way that vamps understood it.

 

Of course, it’d made the means of her coming back all the worse, but it’s taken him another year at least to understand how exactly her psyche has moved on: sitting on the back porch one night, despairing over how they’re going to defeat the First, she confides in him that what she fears most now is this – not the First itself, or the übervamps, or even what they could do to her people (as he’s experienced first-hand all too recently), but that feeling, that dark, weighty hopelessness that takes her back to the weeks after she’d clawed her way out of a childhood fear and into an entirely different one.

 

“I felt like nothing,” she murmurs, “like dust. Like nothing I did mattered. I can’t stand the thought of ever going back to that, but Spike, I don’t know what to do.”

 

Maybe she means it as a sort-of apology, an explanation, maybe even an exorcism of all the badness that’s passed between them, he isn’t sure – she’s never really talked about it before – but he also remembers vividly how she sang about wanting to feel just before she kissed him. How she clung to him those nights in his crypt. There’ll be no kissing now, not ever again most likely, but suddenly, he knows what his role in all of this is.

 

“Hey,” he says, nudging her with his shoulder. “We’ll figure it out, Slayer. What us white hats do, right? And you, you’re... look, the number of times I’ve seen you personally do the impossible... you’re incredible, Buffy. I’ve always believed in you. Even before I liked you.”

 

She doesn’t say anything to that, but snorts softly and slants him a faint smile, and maybe leans a little more tangibly into his side.

 

She’s not the only one who’s lived her greatest fears, after all – he’s seen her dead, and worse, lifeless, and hurt by his own hand after he swore he wouldn’t ever. But the common theme for him, in the recovery, has always been that this beautiful, bright girl at his side has never once stopped trying. Never once stopped shining through all the muck he and the world have put on her. Never once stopped being incredible. And that’s the stuff of dreams, not nightmares.

 


End file.
